Reading The Merchant of Venice Dialogically
MICHAEL SKOVMAND
Seen through the eyes of contemporary Shakespeare criticism, three perhaps four - of Shakespeare's plays stand out as ideologically
problematic or 'politically incorrect': The Merchant of Venice, Othello,
The Tempest - and perhaps The Taming of the Shrew. The specific ways
in which these plays address, or are seen to address, issues of antiSemitism, race, colonialism, and gender respectively, have elicited a
wide range of politically charged responses, both in criticism and
performance. None perhaps more so than The Merchant of Venice. The
play's dominant action of castigation and forced conversion of Shylock
the Jew will inescapably jar post-Holocaust sensibilities to such an
extent that critical responses almost inevitably find themselves bogged
down in negotiating strategies of dismissal or apology, or both. One of
the most recent, and most sophisticated instances of such a negotiation
is found in Harold Bloom's chapter on The Merchant of Venice in
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1999). The initial and
provocative point made by Bloom is this:
One would be blind, deaf and dumb not to recognize
that Shakespeare's grand, equivocal comedy The
Merchant of Venice is nevertheless a profoundly antiSemitic work (pl71)
Of course, this remarkably explicit ethical stance towards
Shakespeare clearly contradicts Bloom's stated intentions in the
introduction to this same book, where he polemicizes what he calls
elsewhere "The School of Resentment" or "French Shakespeare":
Though professional resenters insist that the aesthetic
stance is itself an ideology, I scarcely agree, and I bring
nothing but the aesthetic (in Walter Pater's and Oscar
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Reading The Merchant of Venice Dialogically
Wilde's language) to Shakespeare in this book. Or
rather, he brings it to me, since Shakespeare educated
Pater, Wilde, and the rest of us in the aesthetic, which,
as Pater observed, is an affair of perceptions and
sensations. Shakespeare teaches us how and what to
perceive, and he also instructs us how and what to sense
and then to experience as sensation. Seeking as he did to
enlarge us, not as citizens or as Christians, but as
consciousnesses, Shakespeare outdid all his preceptors as
an entertainer. Our resenters, who can be described (
without malice) as gender-and power-freaks, are not
much moved by the plays as entertainment. (9-10)
Bloom does not explicitly acknowledge this contradiction between
his "aesthetic" ideology and his profound ethical concern about
Shylock, strongly coloured by his own personal stake in "the Jewish
question". Bloom's notion of Shakespeare's effect on his audience, "
not as citizens or as Christians but as consciousnesses" fails to
confront the problem that no consciousness exists in the abstract,
without some specific preconditions and subject matter from which
consciousness springs and with which consciousness is concerned and Bloom's own puzzlement in the face of the conflict between the
aesthetic and ethical issues of The Merchant of Venice, textually and
contextually, bears ample witness in this regard. Michael Bristol,
referring to a Paris Review interview with Bloom, makes a similar point:
Bloom has in fact argued that an honest production of this
play, one that faithfully transmits the work's original
intentions, would be unbearable and intolerable in a postHolocaust context. Here it is abundandy clear that Bloom
speaks as a concrete situated subject, a Jewish son of
immigrant parents who still remembers fighting street
battles to defend himself against persecution by Irish gangs
in the Bronx during the 1930s [...]
Bloom acknowledges the crucial point that has been
made over and over again by the 'resenters', namely that
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Michael Skovmand
literary works are always received against the resistances
and the grievances of their actual but unforeseen
addressees. Criticism really is 'agonistic'... (Bristol: 137)
In the following I propose a dialogic reading of The Merchant of
Venice which attempts to steer clear of two types of monological
readings: on the one hand the Scylla of Harold Bloom's ethically
motivated ' bafflement', and on the other hand, the Charybdis of
the reductiveness of what Bloom - without malice, or so he says, refers to as the school of'gender- and power freaks', or 'resenters'.
The opening scene, always crucial in Shakespeare in terms of
setting of mood and themes, is not at all about Shylock. It is
Antonio, the 'merchant of Venice', who speaks:
In sooth, I know not why I am so sad,
It wearies me, you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn:
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That I have much ado to know myself.
(I,l,linesl-7)
To explain Antonio's sadness as stemming from his worries about
his financial vulnerability would make little sense in the context of
the play as a whole. There is no discussion in the play about the
soundness of Antonio's dispositions ( if we leave out the general
issue of payment of interest, or usury), no warnings against putting
all one's eggs in one basket, and the miraculous return of all of
Antonio's ships in Act V is just mentioned in passing. To argue that
Antonio is sad because Bassanio is getting married draws on what
has become more or less conventional, the reading of the
relationship between Antonio and Bassanio as homoerotic. There is
much to be said for a reading along those lines, with all the mental
reservations as to the peculiarities of Elizabethan conceptions of
love, but, dramatically speaking, Antonio has not been told about
Bassanio's suit for Portia, when he makes his opening speech about
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his sadness, only about a "lady" and a "secret pilgrimage"
(1,1,lines 119-20) - and, going by Bassanio's description of the
project, it is not primarily a love project, but "plots and purposes
how to get clear of all the debts I owe" (1,1,lines 133-34). Indeed,
according to Bassanio's description of the project, this is not the first
time that he has sought Antonio's financial assistance in projects like
this. The only real clues to the mystery of Antonio's sadness are
found in Antonio's two statements about himself: the most quoted
one is from the trial scene, and in response to Bassanio's attempt to
cheer him up:
Antonio I am a tainted wether of the flock,
Meetest for death, - the weakest kind of fruit
Drops earliest to the ground, and so let me;
You cannot better be employ'd Bassanio,
Than to live still and write mine epitaph."
(IV,l,lineslll-118)
The Old Testament image of the 'tainted wether' resonates with
connotations of the barrenness of the sexual outsider, and with the
sacrificial function of the scapegoat, just as the less striking image of
the 'weakest fruit' indicates vulnerability to worms or disease.The
second clue, and perhaps one just as important, lies in Antonio's
response to Gratiano in the opening scene of the play:
Antonio I hold the world but as the world Gratiano,
A stage, where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.
Gratiano Let me play the fool,
With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come,
And let my liver rather heat with wine
Than my heart cool with mortifying groans.
(Act I, sc.l., lines76-82)
The notion of ' teatrum mundi', or the world as a stage, was a
commonplace one, and one which is echoed throughout
Shakespeare's plays. But how does one make dramatic sense of
Antonio's grandiose stage metaphor, or indeed Gratiano's
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response, so early in the play? John Drakakis' discussion of
Antonio's sadness in "Historical Difference and Venetian
Patriarchy" (Drakakis:200-03) identifies Antonio's inability to
understand himself: " And such a want-wit sadness makes of
me/That I have much ado to know myself'(1,1,lines 6-7), but,
while recognising the persuasive arguments for a homosexual or
homosocial reading made by W . H . Auden ((Auden 1963) and
Leslie Fiedler (Fiedler1972), Drakakis steers admirably clear of
them as an exhaustive explanation of that sadness. Instead,
Drakakis draws on the Marxist notion of alienation:
[...] commercial activity is never quite represented in the
play as itself, and is forced to repress, not homosexual
desire, but the reality of its own operations in the world.
The result is precisely that 'alienation' or loss of identity
which Marx identifies in the 'Christian state' which has
yet to become fully secularised [...] From the outset,
therefore, Antonio's 'sadness', and the lack of his selfknowledge are, to a very considerable extent, the subject
of The Merchant of Venice, although the play cannot
speak its concerns directly except in terms of an
intolerant, deeply nationalistic fear." (Drakakis:202-03)
W h y is it that this magisterial Ideologiekritik is less than satisfactory?
Is it perhaps because of its linguistic insistence on the elision of
human agency? "...commercial activity...is forced to repress... the
reality of its own operations"; "...the play cannot speak its concerns
directly..." And is it not because this elision of human agency is
indicative of a particular kind of critical blindness? There is after all
no such thing in the play as commercial activity in the abstract, but
human beings doing business with other human beings within the
confines of the Venetian commercial system. If 'alienation', and
consequent sadness, is a systemic function of 'The Christian state
not yet fully secularised', why are not all the Christians in Venice
sad? Could it be that the reason why Drakakis feels that 'the play
cannot speak its concerns directly' is that players speak, not the play,
and while people may have concerns, the play does not. In other,
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and Bakhtinian words: the play should not be seen as expressive of a
particular (monologic) set of concerns, not even ultimately or 'in the
last instance', but as a set of dialogic transactions - a polyglossia of
discourses interacting within the broad generic framework of
comedy. Shakespeare may of course have had his concerns, but I
suggest that Shakespeare's primary concern as a playwright was to
create a dramatic dynamic out of a rich material of themes, conflicts
and oppositions drawing not just on existing literary sources, but on
received notions of the concepts of Venice, Jewry, usury, etc, and
the genre of romantic comedy. It is in this context that the sadness
of Antonio should be seen - as a position within the play which may
be open to psychologising notions of repressed homosexuality, or
sociologising notions of the displacement of real economic
necessities, but whose primary meaning is the dramatic one within
the play - the function of what one might term melancholy relief.
Again the term relief should be understood not primarily as an
affective function - of the audience being temporarily relieved of of
the dominant comic appeal of the play, but in the sculptural sense of
the term, of throwing into relief. Just as Shakespeare perceived a
dramatic need for the melancholy relief of a Don John in Much Ado,
or Jacques in As You Like It, there is in The Merchant of Venice a
structural need for a passive, melancholy counterpoint to the
youthful energies of the young males of Venice, to be redeemed by
the female resourcefulness of a Portia, whose financial clout is not
based on risky venture capitalism, but on stable, inherited wealth.
This "functional" reading of Antonio and his sadness is signposted, I
suggest, by Antonio's quasi-metatheatrical remark quoted above (" I
hold the world but as the world Gratiano/A stage where every man
must play a part/ And mine a sad one".), and of course supported by
Gratiano's rejoinder ( "Let me play the fool..."). Indeed, within the
Renaissance understanding of the balance of humours within the
human body, there was no need to explain melancholy. Melancholy
was simply understood as the effect of an imbalance in the relative
proportions of blood, phlegm, green bile and black bile within the
body, the melancholy person having an excess of black bile. Which
is to say that in terms of the conditions of intelligibility that
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Michael Skovmand
obtained at the time of the production of the play, neither the
playwright nor the audience would have felt the need to look
beyond Antonio's own explanation in Act I, sc.l : the world is a
stage where every man must play a part, and his is a sad one.
Antonio's sad part in the play is a parallel one to Portia's dead father:
Portia's father is the originator of her wealth, and has determined
the conditions under which his daughter is to be married; Antonio,
by the same token, provides Bassanio with the money necessary to
propose to Portia in the proper fashion, and the conditions of the loan
agreed to between Shylock and Antonio are to play a central role in the
relationship between Portia and Bassanio. Structural counterpoint is a
recurrent feature in Shakespeare's comedies and the dialogic
negotiations of divergent or opposed discourses are the basic ingredients
of Shakespeare's comedic universes, and in The Merchant of Venice the
male-dominated world of Venice is set against the female world of
Belmont. It is however, important to note that a central clue to the
problematic nature of the play is to do not with Belmont and Venice as
a binary or dialectic relation, but rather with the dialogic nature of that
relation. Belmont and Venice are already related before the beginning of
the play: Bassanio's first conversation with Antonio follows up on a
previous discussion:
Ant. Well, tell me now what lady is the same
To whom you swore a secret pilgrimage That you to-day promis'd to tell me of?
( A c t I, sc.l, lines 119-121)
Similarly, the first presentation of Belmont clearly spells out Portia's
coyness in pretending not to have a clear pre-play memory of
Bassanio, at the end of the expository catalogue of lovers (Act I, sc.2,
lines 108-115). The last lines of that scene form an ironic thematic
bridge to the next one:
Come Nerissa, sirrah go before:
Whiles we shut the gate upon one wooer, another
knocks at the door
(Act I,sc 2, lines 126-27)
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There is indeed another wooer knocking at another door, but it is
Bassanio, in the following scene, who is 'wooing' Shylock for the
sum of three thousand ducats:
Enter Bassanio with Shylock the Jew.
Shy. Three Thousand ducats, well.
Bass. Ay, sir, for three months.
Shy. For three months, well.
Bass. For the which as I told you, Antonio shall be bound.
Shy. Antonio shall become bound, well.
(Act I, SC.3, lines 1-5)
Shylock's verbal 'entrance' is among the most spectacular in all of
Shakespeare's plays, comparable perhaps only to Hamlet's in Act I,
sc. 2 : "A little more than kin and less than kind... ". From his very
first line, Shylock, like Hamlet, imposes himself on the drama,
dominating the exchange with Bassanio in an idiom of calculated
repetitions and "well's" which is as individualised as Hamlet's. The
resonance of Shylock's "welT's is strikingly paralleled in
Bakhtin's/Voloshinov's conversation analysis of the single word "well".
1
"Two people are sitting in a room. They are both silent. Then one of them says, "Well!".
The other does not respond..
For us, as outsiders, this entire "conversation" is utterly incomprehensible. Taken in
isolation, the utterance "Well!" is empty and unintelligible. Nevertheless, this peculiar
colloquy of two persons, consisting of only one -although, to be sure, one expressively
intoned - word f...]does make perfect sense, is fully meaningful and complete.
1
In order to disclose the sense and meaning of this colloquy, we must analyse it. But what
is it exactly that we can subject to analysis? Whatever pains we take with the purely verbal
part of the utterance, however subdy we define the phonetic, morphological, and semantic
factots of the wotd well, we shall still not come a single step closer to an understanding of
the whole sense of the colloquy. [...]
What is it we lack, then? W e lack the "extraverbal context" that made the word well a
meaningful locution for the listener.
This extraverbal context of the utterance is comprised of three factors:(l) the common
spatial purview of the interlocutors (the unity of the visible - in this case, the room, a
window, and so on, (2) the interlocutors' common knowledge and understanding of the
situation, and (3) their common evaluation of the situation.
At the time the colloquy took place, both inerlocutors looked up at the window, and saw
that it had begun to snow; both knew that it was already May and that it was high time for
spring to come; finally, both were sick and tired of the protracted winter - they were both
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Harold Bloom's characterization of The Merchant of Venice as
a profoundly anti-Semitic play" may be highly problematic, but
what is beyond debate is that Shylock from his very first words is
cast as a villain. Shylock's 'well's and repetition of Bassanio's phrases
( "Bass.: Ay sir, for three months/ Shy.: For three months, well...
etc), his smug assessment of Antonio's credit rating ( "...ships are but
boards, sailors but men, there be land-rats, and water-rats...") and
his aggressive rejection of dinner with Bassanio and Antonio ( "I will
buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you and so
following: but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with
you...."), all of this signals a seething resentment that is rooted in a
posited prior extradramatic
context, anchored in contemporary
presuppositions, but fleshed out through the specific inflections
provided by Shakespeare. This is exacerbated by Antonio's entrance.
Shylock's aside is unmitigated venom:
Shylock [Aside] How like a fawning publican he looks!
I hate him for he is a Christian:
But more, for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis, and brings down
The rate of usance here with us in Venice.
If I can catch him once upon the hip,
I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him.
(I, 3, lines 36-42)
The confrontation between Antonio and Shylock is dialogic in the
Bakhtinian sense : two competing discourses, set within a context of
unspecified past antagonisms. The venom of Shylock is matched by
the laid-back arrogance of Antonio, who, however, is in the
unenviable and vulnerable position not only of having to stoop to
borrowing money from his enemy, but to compromise on his
principled aversion to interest-taking. Antonio's opening line in this
looking forward to spring and both were bitterly disappointed by the late snowfall. On this
"joindy seen" (snowflakes outside the window), "joindy known" (the time of the year May), and "unanimously evaluated"(winter wearied of, spring looked forward to) - on all
this the utterance directly depends, all this is seized in its actual, living import- in its very
sustenance." (Holquist 1990:62-63)
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confrontation is indicative of this complex power game taking place
between the two characters — it is designed to put Shylock in his
place:
Ant. Shylock, albeit I neither lend or borrow
By taking nor by giving of excess,
Yet to supply the ripe wants of my friend,
I'll break a custom...
(Act I, sc. 3, lines56-59)
Shylock, savouring the vulnerability of his old enemy, is not
prepared to let Antonio off the hook so easily. In his highly
personalised idiom of hesitation, repetition, and feigned attempts at
recollecting things that are crystal-clear in his mind, he is extracting
the maximum of pleasure from Antonio's discomfort:
[...] Well then, your bond, and let me see, - but hear you,
Me thoughts you said, you neither lend nor borrow
Upon advantage.
Ant. I do never use it.
Shy. When Jacob graz'd his uncle Laban's sheep...etc
(Act I, SC.3, lines63-66)
Shylock begins a leisurely and rambling Old Testament analogy which,
ostensibly makes a point about breeding and thrift as time-honoured
Biblical qualities, linking these concepts to that of 'interest'. The
primary - dialogic- function of Shylock's speech is not, however, in its
semantic content. It is, rather, in its act of appropriating the right to
speak, indeed to preach at Antonio. As Bakhtin puts it,
Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and
easily into the private property of the speaker's
intentions; it is populated — overpopulated — with the
intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to
submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult
and complicated process (Holquist 1981:294)
The simmering mutual aggression and resentment make for a
dialogue between Antonio and Shylock - with Bassanio refereeing
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Michael Skovmand
the contest - which is constantly on the verge of running off the
rails, with bad faith on both sides, and with both parties constantly
grasping every opportunity to get at the other person's sensibilities,
or throat. Shylock's choice of an Old Testament analogy - a text
shared by Jews and Christians - to make his case for the taking of
interest, predictably incenses Antonio ( "The devil can cite Scripture
for his purpose..."), and Antonio's attempt to close the deal ("Well,
Shylock, shall we be beholding to you?") affords Shylock yet another
opportunity to push the advantage of his situation:
...You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spet upon my Jewish gabardine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.
[...] What should I say to you? Should I not say
"Hath a dog money? Is it possible
A cur can lend three thousand ducats?...
(Act I, SC.3, lines 106-08; lines 115-17)
Language, in this dramatic confrontation between Shylock and
Antonio, is indeed a contested space, not just in terms of
appropriating the right to speak, but also semantically, in the process
of naming. The phenomenon at the core of this dispute - borrowing
money at interest, is constantly re-named: Antonio: "I neither lend
nor borrow/ By taking nor by giving of excess" "Shylock: "You
neither lend nor borrow/Upon advantage"; Antonio: "And what of
him? [Jacob] did he take *«før.tf?"Shylock: "In the Rialto you have
rated me/ About my moneys and my usances;"Antonio: "...when did
friendship take/A breed for barren metal of his friend?"
The semantic quibbling continues, now focusing on the terms
'kind' and 'kindness':
Shy. ... This is kind I offer.
Bass. This were kindness.
Shy. This kindness I will show...
(Act I, sc. 3, lines 138-39)
Whereupon Shylock explains the conditions attached to the loan,
'the merry bond' of a pound of flesh. J.L. Halio (Halio 1993)
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suggests that Shylock's use of 'kind' in "this is kind I offer" is
unidiomatic, reflecting his status as an alien. John Russell Brown
(Arden edition of MV) points to the double meaning of 'kind' as
'generous' and 'natural'. I would add, against Halio, and
supplementing Brown, that Shylock's use of 'kind' makes a third
kind of sense: as "payment in kind", i.e. payment not in money but
"in goods or natural produce" (COD). This makes all the more
sense, since it connects logically with the preceding lines, in which
Shylock, masterfully, calms down Antonio, who, after Shylock's
"You call'd me a dog " - speech, has risen to the bait, and stormed:
"I am as like to call thee so again/To spet on thee again, to spurn
thee too."
Shylock, playing Antonio like a yo-yo, now calms Antonio
down, as he would a child:
Shy. W h y look you how you storm!
I would be friends with you, and have your love,
Forget the shames that you have stain'd me with,
Supply your present wants, and take no doit
Of usances for my moneys, and you'll not hear me, This is kind I offer. [ My italics]
(Act I, SC.3, lines 133-38)
The word 'kind' is interpreted by Bassanio as 'generosity', but
Shylock immediately picks up the word 'kindness' and imposes his
definition on it: " This kindness I will show you" - and it is indeed
payment 'in kind' that he is referring to - the pound of flesh. There
may be even a further semantic layer involved: Shylock has just
made the first of his two 'identity' speeches ("Hath a dog money?"(
to be followed up in III, 1 by "I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes?"))
The 'merry bond' may indeed signify that, however much he may be
treated as a dog, he and Antonio are 'of a kind', belonging to the
same species. Shylock's offer can thus be seen as a parodic version of
Antonio's feudal notions of the taking of interest as being
dishonourable among peers. Contrary to his earlier Old Testament
analogy of interest as 'breeding', Shylock now suggests the opposite:
interest as physical reduction- the carving out of human flesh.
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Shylock clearly reiterates Antonio's terms ' friendship' ("... when did
friendship take a breed for barren metal of his friend?") in his
phrase: " I extend this friendship,/ If he will take it, so - if not,
adieu." And there is in fact a surprisingly quick inversion at the end
of this act, when Antonio seems to be won over by Shylock's baited
offer, or at least mollified, echoing Shylock's declension of
kind/kindness: ( "... there is much kindness in the Jew" ; "... The
Hebrew will turn Christian, he grows kind.") It is now Bassanio, up
until this point broker and mediator of the deal, who has second
thoughts: "I like not fair terms, and a villain's mind."
The dynamics of this crucial scene between Shylock and
Antonio, accordingly, hinge on two semantic negotiations: on the
one hand, the idea of a concept, or a signified - the payment of
interest - expressed through a whole range of shifting signifiers. On
the other hand, the presence of one - compound - signifier:
kind/kindness, which is given a whole range of semantic inflections.
But these dynamics do not simply co-exist, they relate to one
another dialogically. Language is "over-populated with the
intentions of others", always pre-empting or anticipating future
answers. And "utterance" in Act I, scene 3 in The Merchant of Venice
is dialogic in a very overt sense, in that the two main characters
continuously negotiate, or struggle, both semantically and in terms
of what contemporary linguistics would call "turn-taking". The
scene could almost be said to be dialogically overdetermined, in the
sense that it is quite literally a negotiation over the conditions of a
loan, with all the ideological implications involved in Venetian/ and
by extension, Elizabethan borrowing and lending in the 1590s.
What Balduin calls the "internal dialogization" of discourse, in
which the speaker echoes or imitates or redefines the phrases of
others may take many forms, but these forms are always oriented
towards an answer, in anticipation or rebuttal or negotiation or
approval. In the scene between Shylock and Antonio this
"answerability" of utterance is primarily between the two characters
- although wider contexts of social, cultural and religious
implications resonate throughout.
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Two scenes further on in the play, we come across an instance
of 'internal dialogization' contained within the utterance of not two
characters, but one, in the form of the first soliloquy of The
Merchant of Venice, interestingly not given by a major character in
the play, but by Launcelet Gobbo, the Clown, a farcical character in
the employ of Shylock. The leaving of an empty stage to a minor,
and static, low-life character contains in itself a parodic element,
foregrounding as it does the incongruity of a minor character in a
dramatically major function. This soliloquy marks an abrupt
change of address from the previous scene, in which the Prince of
Morocco fails Portia's test at Belmont. Morocco's closing couplet: "Good fortune then, / To make me blest or cursed among men" rhymed blank verse, marks a level of formality, against which
Lancelot Gobbo's babbling prose is a dramatic drop, an effect of
bathos or 'sinking'. Furthermore, the audience experiences a sudden
switch of direction. From overhearing conversation between
characters on stage, the audience is suddenly addressed directly, and
are being taken into the confidence of Gobbo. This is the mode of
address Shakespeare's audience of the 1590s, many of which first
generation urbanites, would be familiar with from earlier popular
theatricals of streets and courtyards, morality plays in particular.
And not only is the form of address reminiscent of the morality play,
this is also true of Lancelot Gobbo's subject matter and rhetoric.
Gobbo parodically casts himself in the role of Everyman, caught in
the middle between the tempting 'fiend' and his conscience. His
dilemma, parodically, is not a major moral issue, but the more
mundane one whether to stay in the service of Shylock or not, and,
again in a parodic inversion of the morality tradition, Gobbo opts
for the advice of the fiend, and chooses to leave Shylock. Gobbo's
language is another indication of the 'heteroglossia' of the scene. His
'malapropisms' mimic the posturing of an uneducated man trying
desperately to master the complexities of a language beyond his
2
Among the few examples are Lance - and his dog - in Two Gentlemen of Verona, ACT 4,
sc.4; Bottom the Weaver in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 2, sc. 1 ("Bottom's Dream"),
and perhaps Pompey in Measure for Measure, Act 4, sc. 3, although the last example is little
more than a catalogue of prison inmates.
2
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reach. Historically speaking, the ambiguity of Launcelot Gobbo "the clown", as it says in the stage direction - is the ambiguity of a
theatrical stereotype in transition: the clown or fool of popular late
medieval theatre developing into the fast-talking, street-smart
domestic of city comedy and (much later) Sam Weiler fame in
Dickens. Indeed, as Launcelot Gobbo's morality soliloquy segues
into the next situation, with the arrival of Old Gobbo, Launcelot's
father, modern audience sympathies are likely to be tested to the
full. Launcelot's father is old and blind, arriving with a dish of doves
for his son's master, from the slow, deferential world of a rural
subsistence economy, totally out of place in the ironic,
commercialised universe of Venice, in which loyalties are as
ephemeral as the fortunes of vessels at sea:
Launcelot [Aside] O heavens! This is my true-begotten
father, who being more than sand-blind, high gravelblind, knows me not, - I will try confusions with him.
(Act II, SC.2, lines 33-35)
One may wonder just how funny it will have appeared to an
Elizabethan audience to watch an old, blind man, lost in the city, being
played tricks on by his own son. The cruelty exhibited in the taunting
of this old man could be seen to prefigure an equally gratuitous
exhibition of cruelty towards another old man - Shylock, who is not
only deprived of his livelihood - his money - but is forced to convert to
Christianity. In fact, the 'unpleasantness' of The Merchant of Venice is
nowhere stronger than in the trial scene, in which the entire Venetian
establishment are openly ranked against Shylock, whose only protection
is the impartiality of the City Charter. As gratuitously cruel as
Launcelot to his father is Gratiano, constandy jeering and sneering. As
Harold Bloom puts it," [his] anti-Semitic vulgarity reminds me of
Julius Streicher; Hider's favorite newspaper editor." Bloom continues:
The last two centuries of stage tradition have made
Shylock a hero-villain, but the text cannot sustain such an
interpretation. Since Shylock is a murderous villain, then
Gratiano, though a touch crude, must be taken as a good
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Reading The Merchant of Venice Dialogically
fellow, cheerful and robust in his anti-Semitism, a kind of
Pat Buchanan of Renaissance Venice. (Bloom: 173)
Bloom is right in pointing out that the text does not support an
interpretation of Shylock as a hero-villain. But he is wrong in
drawing the conclusion that this eo ipso means that we should read
Gratiano as a 'good fellow'. In fact, Bloom himself provides part of
the argument against his own 'monologic' reading of the play in
some of his closing comments on the play, with reference to A.P.
Rossiter's jusdy famous Angel with Horns from 1961:
"A.P. Rossiter [...] said that ambivalence was peculiarly the
dialectic of Shakespeare's history plays, defining
Shakespearean ambivalence as one mode of irony or
another. Irony is indeed so pervasive in Shakespeare, in
every genre, that no comprehensive account of it is
possible. What in The Merchant of Venice is not ironical,
including the Belmont celebration of Act V?" (Bloom: 190)
Indeed, and why should Gratiano be exempt from this pervasive irony?
Consequendy, whereas the trial scene of Act IV may be the dramatic
culmination of the play, running the full gamut of legalistic argument,
political consideration, appeals to mercy and sheer vindictiveness, and
leaving the audience with all the uncertainties of response voiced by
Harold Bloom and others, it is in our interpretation of Act V that we
ultimately need to make up our minds as to what kind of play The
Merchant of Venice is. A.D. Nuttall, in his analysis of The Merchant of
Venice from 1983 (Nuttall: 88) makes an interesting distinction between
'transparent' and 'opaque' critics: on the one hand critics whose desire is
to disambiguate or monologise Shakespeare, on the other hand critics
who are concerned with the dissonances and ambiguities in Shakespeare's
plays. The first school of critics will be looking for closure in Act V of
The Merchant of Venice. John Russell Brown, whose performanceoriented approach sees the two themes of love and money reconciled in
Act V, in the celebration of'love's wealth' (Russell Brown: 174), or C.L.
Barber in his Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, whose broader socio-cultural
approach brings him to identify Act V as the joyful reestablishment of
social harmony. As Barber puts it,
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Michael Skovmand
No other comedy, until the late romances, ends with so
full an expression of harmony as that which we get in
the opening of the final scene of The Merchant of Venice.
And no other final scene is so completely without irony
about the joys it celebrates.
3
A more 'opaque' reading of the last act of The Merchant of Venice is
provided by Catherine Belsey in her essay 'Love in Venice' (Belsey
1998). Act V - one continuous scene - functions as both resolution
and epilogue to the play. The act opens with the famous "In Such a
Night" exchange between Lorenzo and Jessica :
Lor. The moon shines bright. In such a night as this
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees
And they did make no noise, in such a night
Troilus methinks mounted the Trojan walls
And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents
Where Cressid lay that night.
Jes. In such a night
Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew,
And saw the lion's shadow ere himself
and ran dismayed away.
Lor. In such a night .. .etc
(Act V, sc.l, linesl-11)
In her analysis of the opening tete-a-tete between Lorenzo and
Jessica, Belsey notes elements which appear incongruous in what is
supposedly an unqualified celebration of the joy of love. The stories
of Troilus and Cressida, Pyramus and Thisbe, Dido and Aeneas, and
Medea are love stories, but they are stories of betrayal, desertion and
death. The beautifully cadenced shared lines of Lorenzo and Jessica
create a subtly discordant effect with the classical references to
unhappy stories of love. Belsey interprets this element of discord as a
C.L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation
to Social Custom (Princeton, NJ, 1959), p.187. I owe this reference to Catherine Belsey,
'Love in Venice', in The Merchant of Venice - Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. by
Martin Coyle (Macmillan 1998), p.140.
3
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Reading The Merchant of Venice Dialogically
conflict in the text between an older view of love as 'anarchic,
destructive and dangerous' (p.141) and a domesticated view of love
as 'marriage, concord, consent and partnership':
...the older understanding of love leaves traces in the
text, with the effect that desire is only imperfectly
domesticated, and in consequence the extent to which
Venice is superimposed upon Belmont becomes visible
to the audience (p.141)
Belsey then moves on to broader and well-argued considerations of
'desire', 'riddles' and 'love vs friendship' in Act V, emphasising the
multiplicity rather than the indeterminacy of such elements. However,
Belsey's reading of the Lorenzo-Jessica exchange, imposing as it does
broad structural allegory on this passage, misses the way it is anchored
to the two characters in question, and the significance of this
anchorage. A more detailed textual analysis may illuminate this:
Shakespeare can be seen to have created subde directions
of diction in the 'take-overs' ('antilabe' is the technical
term) between the two characters: the first two 'take-overs'
are perfect pentameters : "Where Cressid lay that night/In
such a night"; "And ran dismayed away/In such a night".
The next two increase the tempo and intensity by
overlapping by one beat:"To come again to Car(thage)/In
such a night"; "That did renew old Ae(son)/In such a
night". The two last take-overs, however, turn towards
their personal relationship, and all of a sudden the opposite
effect is introduced: the lack of a beat - the significant
pause: "As far as Belmont (-)/ In such a night"; "And ne'er
a true one (-)/ In such a night" - after which Jessica waxes
meta-poetical, expressing her impatience with the
repetitive 'night' motif, and including, perhaps, some
sexual innuendo: " I would out-night you did nobody
come..." - an indication of the playful tit for tat nature of
their exchanges. J . L. Halio's reading of this scene, while
more concrete than Belsey's, psychologizes the exchange:
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Michael Skovmand
...the allusions may seem inappropriate in the mouths of
these newly-weds, even as they tease one another, joking
half-nervously, perhaps, about love's transience...
(Halio: 137-38)
Halio makes further reference to what he calls 'dark undercurrents'
in lyrical scenes in Shakespeare, e.g. A Midsummer Nights Dream, I,
1, lines 168-79. However, Lysander's unfazed response contradicts
Halio's theory of dark undercurrents in lyrical scenes in Shakespeare.
Lysander does not take Hermia's 'dark' references seriously, because
they are not meant to be taken seriously, either by him or by the
audience. Rather, they are to be read as meta-poetical playfulness, an
anti-Petrarchan swipe at courtly posturing. In addition, this tonguein-cheek, yet serious response is a way of asserting the independence
of mind of the female character, a signalling of anti-submissiveness
which adds interest and grit to the love relationship.
These points can be applied to the Lorenzo/Jessica exchange in
The Merchant of Venice, but with a couple of differences: Lorenzo
and Jessica are not major characters in the play - consequently there
is little or no focus on nuances and developments in their
relationship. They are, rather, dramatic functions that mirror or
contrast themes or conflicts driven by the major characters. Add to
this the fact that that their exchange is placed as an opening mood
setter in the final act of the play - the 'coda', to use Belsey's musical
analogy, and the significance of this interchange becomes more
apparent. As a bridge to the previous scene in Act IV it continues
the mood of erotic bantering and functions as a prequel in 'minor'
to the 'major' romantic resolution of the play. Indeed, the musical
theme is literalized as the resident musicians of Portia's aristocratic
household are brought outside for some night music to welcome the
return of Portia and Nerissa from Venice. Into the mouth of
Lorenzo is placed a series of meditations on the power of music:
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils,
(Act V, sc.l, lines 83-85)
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Reading The Merchant of Venice Dialogically
As Portia and Nerissa enter, this is followed by yet another series
of philosophical reflections on relativity. As Portia phrases it,
Nothing is good ( I see) without respect," relating her observation
both to the light from the house that was not visible while the
moon shone, and to the sounds of instruments and birds, which
sound sweeter by night than by day.
However beautifully phrased and harmoniously organised, it is
difficult to make sense of this sequence in dramatic terms, except as
purple patches bridging the gap to the final comic resolution, not of
the love plot itself, which was effectively resolved as early as in Act
III, but of the final consummation between the two pairs of lovers,
which was delayed by the Shylock/Antonio trial, and given a final
twist with the introduction of the ring complication.
In dramatic terms, there is no way of explaining away the fact that we
have arrived at the epilogue. The minuscule lovers' tiffs left to be sorted out
leave us with no sense of substantive unresolved conflict. The only way to
make dramatic sense of Act V, accorclingly, is to see it as a way of effecting
closure by means of constructing a broad movement of mood, from night
to early dawn. The entire act is permeated with references, metaphorical
and otherwise, to the fact that this is a scene set at night - moving towards
early dawn. It opens with Lorenzo and Jessica's "In Such a night "dialogue. It continues with Portia and Bassanio meeting:
Bass. W e should hold day with the Antipodes,
If you would walk in absence of the sun.
Portia Let me give light, but let me not be light,
For a light wife doth make a heavy husband,...
(ActV,sc.l,li. 124-130)
The closing lines of the play, spoken by Gratiano, are a final
underscoring of this night/early dawn setting:
Gratiano Let it be so, - the first inter'gatory
That my Nerissa shall be sworn on, is,
Whether till next night she had rather stay,
Or go to bed now (being two hours to day):
But were day come, I should wish it dark
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Michael Skovmand
Till I were couching with the doctor's clerk.
Well, while I live, I'll fear no other thing
So sore, as keeping safe Nerissa's ring.
(ActV, sc. 1, lines 300-307)
So, although the play ends on a light note of sexual banter by a relatively
peripheral character, the general sense of Shakespeare elaborately
constructing a final movement towards comedic closure cannot be ignored.
It is, however, an indication of the dialogic strain of combining
the Belmont and Rialto plots that Shakespeare felt it necessary to
have a full final act to attempt to reconcile the heteroglossia of a play
which seems to be coming apart at the seams in its attempt to be
both a comedy, a romance and a problem play.
University of Aarhus
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Reading The Merchant of Venice Dialogically
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